Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, Jeff Merkley, the junior senator from Oregon.

Merckley is probably most famous politically for being the only Democratic senator to endorse Bernie Sanders last year.

Well, that was last year, and now he's looking forward,

and just got back from Iowa himself.

That's right.

Add him to that list of 2020 Democrats that gets longer and longer and longer, almost by the week.

Here's the space that Merckley wants to be in, the pragmatic progressive.

But not the Hillary Clinton version of that.

Merckley is a full blast, proud lefty across the board on every issue, no moderation progressive.

He's the guy who pitched for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would have fought

workplace discrimination for LGBT people in the Senate,

and he pushed hard on the home affordable modification program, which put in mortgage protections after the housing crisis.

More recently, he's the guy who spoke for over 15 hours against the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Technically, it wasn't a filibuster.

And obviously, it didn't work.

But what I mean by pragmatic is that he's also the guy who, since last fall, when he thought

his role was going to be pushing a president Hillary Clinton to the left on cabinet

nominations, has been convening a small group of senators and activist groups in his office

to get them working on strategy about how to actually get things done, bringing people together.

It fits in with being an amateur engineer of sorts. As you'll hear, he built himself a wind turbine

in his backyard. Naturally, it's now stuck in a tree.

But now Merkley is a guy who's not willing to cede the ground on the left flank of the brewing Democratic presidential primary field to Sanders or to Elizabeth Warren or to anyone else.

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